Helping kids become proficient readers is a big deal. Schools often screen children’s decoding skills (the ability to sound out words) to figure out who needs help. But what do screening results mean for children’s future reading ability? Petersen et al. followed a diverse group of children from kindergarten to fifth grade to find out.

The authors administered a quick dynamic assessment task at the beginning of kindergarten. Children were asked to decode four nonsense words, taught how to decode them, and asked to decode them again. Examiners scored children’s accuracy and how easily they responded to teaching. The task took only three minutes to administer on average. (The task is described more in this article, and it’s similar to the decoding tasks on the PEARL.) The children’s schools also screened their ability to name letters and sounds at the beginning of kindergarten and their oral reading fluency at the end of each year.

Performance on the dynamic task in kindergarten classified children into average vs. struggling reader categories in fifth grade with 75–80% accuracy. The 3-minute dynamic task was better at predicting reading skill than the traditional static (one-time) screening, especially for the Hispanic students in the sample, many of whom were English language learners.

The task wasn’t perfect at predicting fifth grade reading skill, but it was pretty good, especially considering how fast it was to administer. These findings suggest that, compared to the static measures, dynamic assessment of decoding could save a ton of intervention time. Dynamic tasks are less likely to pick up children who just lack reading exposure, saving us time for working with the kids who will continue to need help with reading (AKA, making RTI less of a massive undertaking).